The diverse fishing arts, principally those dedicated to sports fishing, both marine and freshwater, use a wide variety of lures with hooks whose form or characteristics are aimed at attracting the attention of the fish and other prey. Many of these lures aim to imitate not only the form of the usual prey of the fish but also their organoleptic qualities and even their movements. To achieve this, the angler must provoke the movement of the lure, either by propelling it through the air and actively recovering the line to which it is attached in the water, using for example a fishing reel; or by dragging the bait through the water propelled by a aquatic vehicle that tows the line, an art known as trolling fishing or “curricán fishing”, or a combination of both. In both cases, and in more importantly in trolling, the dragging of the lure provokes a lot of friction between the lure and the water, which augments with the speed, such that the bait must show a strong resistance to traction so that it doesn't disintegrate.
In some cases, the lure is composed of elements made from stiff materials, with or without articulations, with a certain capacity to navigate beneath the water. This navigation is based on the dynamics provoked by the counter-current forces generated in dragging the bait, which creates a motion, be it rotary (“spinning”), snaking, wavy, vibrant or erratic of such lures. These elements can be endowed with reflecting or coloured surfaces, and can even be made to fluoresce, making them more striking to the fish and in this way increasing their attraction. In other cases, the most commonly used in marine sports fishing, the lures are composed of flexible elements, being made of soft and/or elastic materials that as well as moving freely against the current, can also recreate the movements described above. These lures, usually completely or partially imitate, with great precision, the form of many vertebrate and invertebrate aquatic animals, common prey of the majority of the sports fish. Furthermore, colours and other types of attractants for the fish can be incorporated, such as stimulant chemical substances, natural or synthetic, related to the organic systems of the common prey or to the sensory systems of the predators. The stability of the bait in the water is fundamental when it is to be used as a lure with a hook, given that dragging the bait might lead to its dispersion, dissolution or disintegration, thereby losing its shape and/or its attractive properties. The bites of the fish as they pick at the bait, as well as the struggle that develops during the capture can easily break or unhook the bait.
The aim of producing these artificial lures is to substitute many of the natural baits, such as insects, worms, molluscs, crustacea, fish and other animals, used both in commercial and sports fishing, and whose availability not only depends on their prior capture, but whose quality is also heterogeneous. These natural baits may also be found intermittently depending on the seasons, as well a being conditioned by specific extrinsic factors such as the climate, which can make the effort and the cost of obtaining them extraordinarily high. These factors critically influence in the returns from commercial fishing of different species, as well as in the market value of a catch and in an important manner in the costs of this sporting activity.
The development of baits and artificial lures has been the subject of numerous patents, that have dealt with aspects such as: the production of baits using natural and/or synthetic materials; the shape, colour and the dynamic designs; the hormone additives, tastes and scents as attractants; the form in which these are integrated into the lure (encapsulated, dissolved, embedded, as a coating, etc.), as well as the form of combining natural and artificial elements in the same lure that is capable of imitating the effects of the baits used, for example in commercial fishing.
The use of collagen to produce baits and lures was proposed in a copending patent application of Etayo, V. & García, I.; (2004), that is being processed with the present application, in which it is claimed the use of fibrous collagen from any animal source to manufacture baits by molding and coagulating hydrated fibrous pastes, to form stable gels in diverse animal shapes, that can be subsequently dehydrated. These gels possess physico-chemical and mechanical properties that permit them to be used as baits attracting the fish, either due to its composition, its shape or due to its capacity to chemically fix attractants, both when fishing with a hook and rod or in any type of fishing where a bait is used.
On rare occasions, the use of sausage skins or casings of collagen have been reported as a container for other agglutinated substances in pastes or gels that constitute the bait; for example the elaboration of fishing baits using a cured collagen sausage skin, dried and perforated has been described, as in the patent by P. Morton, (U.S. Pat. No. 5,216,829, 1993), with the goal of stuffing in this a mass of ground scraps of meat, in this way achieving the slow liberation of the molecules and scents that come from them; similarly, the patent of Teepak U.S. Pat. No. 5,281,425 (K. V. Stribling, 25 Jan. 1994) should be mentioned, in which a mass of meat scraps from the boning of poultry, pork or beef, are stuffed into a skin of collagen, dried and cured to make sausages, that are subsequently sliced and sealed, making a bait that stimulates the scent of marine crustaceans.
As such, there is still a need to provide state of the art alternative bait to confront the problem of the scarcity, variability, cost, and availability of baits for commercial fishing that greatly conditions the economics of this activity. The proposed solution set forth by the present invention consists in providing a universal bait based on fibrous collagen that can substitute the usual baits without generating environmental risks and that furthermore, has a good capacity of diffusion and liberation of attractant substances, has excellent mechanical properties, principally in its resistance to breakage and tearing, that is easily manipulated, transported and stored.